CURATOR MASSIMILIANO GIONI'S choice of Il palazzo
enciclopedico (The Encyclopedic Palace) as the lodestar for his Biennale
exhibition is beguiling and provocative in equal measure. As conceived
by Marino Auriti, a self-taught, first-generation Italian-American
artist, this imaginary museum was as ambitious as it was unbridled.
Aspiring to house the breadth of human knowledge, Auriti designed a
thirty-six-story tower that would have risen nearly half a mile into the
sky while covering sixteen city blocks in the US capital. But, since he
lacked academic or professional credentials of any kind, the former
garage mechanic, who sought to patent his project in 1955, would never
have secured the sanction of officialdom for a plan well-nigh impossible
to construct. From the outset, this quintessential outsider assumed the
role of a visionary.

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The wooden scale model of Il Palazzo has been installed at the
threshold of the Arsenale, one of the two venues hosting the Biennale
exhibition. Given that Auriti supplied no concrete guidelines to suggest
how the contents of his tower might be identified, assembled, ordered,
classified, and presented, Gioni has found inspiration elsewhere--in the
lofty triumvirate of Andre Breton, Carl Jung, and Rudolf Steiner.
Embodiments of the crucial roles assigned to imagination, dream,
fantasy, and cosmological speculation in Gioni's exhibition, they
dominate the entrance galleries to the Central Pavilion, the
Biennale's second site. Branching out from there are galleries
devoted to the works of pedigreed mystics, occultists, and visionaries
such as Aleister Crowley, Hilma af Klimt, Emma Kunz, and Roger Caillois,
the last represented by his remarkable collection of geological samples.
A miscellany of diverse artifacts orbits this nexus: anonymous Tantric
paintings; sketches made by tribal societies in Melanesia collected by
the Viennese photographer and ethnologist Hugo Bernatzik; ecstatic
drawings created by sundry Shakers as gifts for fellow believers; small
carvings of animals both fabulous and familiar made by folk sculptor
Levi Fisher Ames, who embellished his menagerie with outlandish
narratives during his tent shows in turn-of-the-century rural Wisconsin.
Also included are contributions from several autodidacts who obsessively
designed architectural models, and with whom Auriti might have felt a
close kinship: Augustin Lesage, Achilles Rizzoli, and an obscure
Austrian insurance clerk (whose dollhouse-size dwellings were discovered
in a junk shop by artist Oliver Croy and are here presented as a work,
The 387 Houses of Peter Fritz (1916-1992), Insurance Clerk from Vienna,
1993-2008, by Croy and curator Oliver Elser). Rubbing shoulders with
objects that would conventionally be regarded as marginal or otherwise
ancillary to mainstream contemporary art are works by some of that
world's most renowned figures--Tacita Dean, Maria Lassnig, Tino
Sehgal, Richard Serra, and Dorothea Tanning--and by many others less
well known.

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The labyrinthine layout of this historic building contributes
significantly to Gionf's aim of establishing networks of relations
among artifacts whose common characteristic is "the representation
of the invisible": "The Encyclopedic Palace is a show about
seeing with the eyes shut," he writes. While this stance,
emblematized in the closed eyelids of Breton's cast, serves well
those whose vision is manifestly inner-directed, at times it produces
strained readings. Consider the suggestive pairing of Serra's
two-part forged sculpture dedicated to Pier Paolo Pasolini with Thierry
De Cordier's series of heaving marine-scapes: Are connections to be
discerned in recondite correspondences--by reference to what Jung termed
primordial or first images, over and above modes of visceral and
phenomenological apprehension? While Gioni's curatorial strategy
productively upends the hierarchies that conventionally classify artists
as professionals or mavericks or outliers, it divests the works of all
traces of the material and intellectual conditions that originally
imbued them with meaning and value. The historicity of ideas is called
into question when works made in far-flung locations and vastly
different circumstances over the course of more than a century are cast
into a timeless present.

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It is no surprise, in this regard, that echoes of the Wunderkammer,
or cabinet of curiosities, sound throughout this section of the
exhibition. Devised in early modern Europe to incite wonder, this model
for collecting and organizing artifacts of the most rarefied and
marvelous kind has become well worn in recent years. In this instance,
our capacity to marvel is soon taxed. The bewildering conjunction of
entrancing inventiveness, esoteric cosmologies, visionary epiphanies,
dark fantasies, enigmatic weirdness, monomaniacal tunnel vision, and
much else in like vein threatens to overwhelm visitors, stifling their
capacity for affective responses. This may, in fact, be the desired
effect, a necessary precondition condition for what Gioni has claimed is
ultimately an anthropological inquiry.

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The show shifts gears at the Arsenate, where an alternative to the
protomuseological model of the cabinet of curiosities underpins the
presentation: the modern museum. Progeny of the Enlightenment, this
template puts rationalized systems--ordering, classifying, analysis,
etc.--into the service of knowledge production. An engagement with those
conceptual systems has been generative for contemporary art, as
evidenced here, for example, by Christopher Williams's seminal
photo-based piece Angola to Vietnam*, 1989, which takes as its point of
departure Harvard University's Ware collection of glass flowers,
and proceeds to weave a richly layered complex of references (social,
political, and cultural). But more recent works that turn to the archive
as resource or tool frequently seem routine, at times even stale. Too
often, as seen in Linda Fregni Nagler's compilation of almost one
thousand images of babies being held by indeterminate figures, The
Hidden Mother, 2006-13, such works rely narrowly on typological and
serial extension.

Yet the problems may not lie with the discursive strategies that
subtend the Enlightenment's paradigm of the modern museum--they may
ultimately reside in the museal model itself. Almost a decade ago, in
his landmark text "An Archival Impulse," Hal Foster
persuasively argued that a consensus had emerged that "the museum
has been ruined as a coherent system in a public space." Presumably
mindful of this debate, Gioni--who conceives his project of making a
"temporary museum" as nothing less than a pedagogical
undertaking, though not "dry in a German-theme-show kind of
way"--turned to a methodology that seems to acknowledge the long
relationship between the modern museum and anthropology, a discipline
whose mandate from its inception was to find a "scientific"
scheme for the display of material artifacts, and whose history in fact
cannot be separated from that of the museum. In the Arsenale, he evokes,
without necessarily claiming confidence in, the modern museum's
strategies of organization and coherence. In collaboration with
architect Annabelle Selldorf, Gioni has transformed the former
rope-making factory into an enfilade of luminous galleries. Generously
and elegantly hung, these ample white-cube spaces are interspersed with
fully provisioned black boxes dedicated to films, videos, sound, and
computer-generated works. Following on from loose groupings of exhibits
that involve taxonomies and archives is an anatomical theater of bodily
images assembled by Cindy Sherman, and a section largely devoted to
younger artists (Wade Guyton, Helen Marten, Pamela Rosenkranz, etc.) who
deploy contemporary technologies integral to our digital era's
fusion of spectacle, information, and knowledge. A sampling of veteran
artists occupy the final spaces: Stan VanDerBeek, Walter De Maria, Otto
Piene, Dieter Roth. Albeit in diverse ways, all--with the exception of
Bruce Nauman, an inveterate skeptic--tend toward visions, worldly and
otherworldy, that are encompassing or synoptic.

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Among the show's standouts are works by Sharon Hayes, Artur
Zmijewski, and Fischli tic Weiss. Hayes's disarmingly modest
documentary Ricerche: three (Research: three), 2013, records a lively
interview with a group of young college women. Over the course of the
conversation, the students explore their shifting and often newly won
views on gender and sexual relations, and vividly evince the mutual
support they anticipate from their peer group for their experiments in
self-fashioning and self-definition. Zmijewski's eighteen-minute
video Blindly, 2010, focuses on a handful of adults whom he invited into
a studio setting so that he could record them making paintings. Their
commentaries on the task at hand are interspersed with remarks on the
difficulties they face daily as a consequence of either losing their
sight or being blind from birth. As is so often the case in his charged
works, Zmijewski turns the camera metaphorically (if not literally) on
the spectator, implicating her and rendering problematic any notion of a
dispassionate or disinterested spectatorship. Not incidentally, this
disquieting work skeptically probes romantic investments in the value of
creating "with the eyes shut." More laconic but no less
provocative, Peter Fischli and the late David Weiss's enthralling
ensemble of some 130 small unfired-clay sculptures, Suddenly This
Overview, 1981-2012, appears to have been produced by a group of
children, naifs, amateurs, hobbyists, and vernacular craftsmen. The
Swiss duo's comic, banal, sly, skeptical, salacious, familiar,
ersatz, and populist images touch on myriad subjects, sayings, beliefs,
speculations, prejudices, values, and ideals in apparently arbitrary
fashion. Not only multiple hands but multiple minds might have conjured
this paean to the ungovernable profusion and vibrancy of the everyday
world.

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Though each can be related to the larger ideas governing
Gioni's project, these three works are still somehow anomalous in
this context. Seldom found elsewhere in the show is their level of
critical reflexivity, their commitment to collaboratively driven,
socially engaged positions, and their timely groundedness in the world
at hand. By default if not design, they underline the limitations of a
commitment to ways of seeing that are resolutely hermetic, that
soft-pedal the potential for knowledge to effect change in the here and
now. And, not least, they underline the risk of obscuring the
ideological mechanisms that underpin knowledge production of all kinds.

For conceptual as well as practical reasons, Auriti's
visionary model was doomed. Nonetheless, Gioni counterposes it against
the failed museal models that are still the mainstay of our institutions
today. While acknowledging the impossibility of Auriti's dream of
accumulating all knowledge, he casts his vote in favor of a hermeneutics
based on oneiric fantasies, spiritual revelation, and cosmic
speculation.

Visitors encountering the wooden model a second time, on exiting
the Arsenale, may find that the spell it wove on first viewing has
somewhat abated. A specter, another tower of legendary repute, haunts
the gallery. Though conceived in a spirit of utopian univocal harmony,
the Tower of Babel, as Bruegel revealed in his iconic depiction of 1563,
ended in ruins: a polyglot cacophony in which each voice was destined to
commune only with itself.

LYNNE COOKE IS ANDREW W. MELLON PROFESSOR AT THE CENTER FOR
ADVANCED STUDIES IN THE VISUAL ARTS, NATIONAL GALLERY OF ART.
WASHINGTON, DC. (SEE CONTRIBUTORS.)

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